Žižek’s Holy Spirit: equality, love, community, freedom

2002 words, 10 min read

The Post-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek is perhaps a surprising source of insights about the Holy Spirit, but I believe that his perspective is highly relevant for atheists and Christians alike. My first encounter with his thought on the subject was in a transcript of him addressing Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in 2011:

“What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the Holy Spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols.”

Instead of being a throw-away comment of the moment, Žižek’s view of the Holy Spirit is the result of careful reflection from a number of viewpoints.

In a 2007 lecture - entitled “Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross” - he elaborated on how it is that the Holy Spirit is the source of the Christian community and pointed to the radicality of life that such a basis implies:

“The Holy Spirit is the love between believers; it is the spirit of the community of believers, according to the famous words of Christ: “For where two or three have gathered together in my name, I am there in their midst.” (Matthew 18:20) I think this passage should be taken literally. So what does this mean? Even today, the message is very radical. The temptation to be resisted is the temptation of meaning itself. […] I claim that Christ died on the cross precisely to reject [...] attempts at finding a higher purpose or meaning. Rather the message is: “Your standards matter to me. I throw myself into creation, and abandon my place up there.” The conclusions are radical. The ultimate meaning of Christianity for me is a very precise one. It is not: “We should trust God. The big guy’s with me, so nothing really bad can happen.” That is too easy. The message is not: “We trust God.” The message is rather: “God trusts us.” The gesture of Christ says, “I leave it over to you.” Usually we read religion as the way to guarantee meaning: We are concerned with the small details of everyday life and never know what will come of it all, or how things will turn out; we can only make wagers, and we do this maybe to ensure that God will arrange things in our favor. But the meaning of the death of Christ for me is the opposite: God made the wager on us. It is really a crazy wager, where God is saying: “I leave it to you. Holy Ghost, community of believers, you have to do it!””

In the same piece Žižek also demonstrates that his thoughts on the Holy Spirit are not merely an analysis from outwith or a thinking about an other, but that they are pertinent to his own context and community:

“[The] link between Christian community and the progressive movement is crucial. And here I’m not playing a cheap game of identifying radical political movements as a kind of religious community; what I’m referring to is the idea of a radical community of believers. The ideal is neither that of blind liberal individuals collaborating with each other, nor the old organic conservative community. It is a community along the lines of the original Christian community: A community of outcasts. We need this today, this idea of an egalitarian community of believers that is neither the traditional heretical community nor the liberal multiplicity. This is why I and many other leftist philosophers, such as Alain Badiou and others, are so interested in rereading, rehabilitating, and reappropriating the legacy of Paul. It is not just a matter of private religious convictions. I claim that if we lose this key moment—the moment of realizing the Holy Spirit as a community of believers—we will live in a very sad society, where the only choice will be between vulgar egoist liberalism or the fundamentalism that counterattacks it. This is why I—precisely as a radical leftist—think that Christianity is far too precious a thing to leave to conservative fundamentalists. We should fight for it. Our message should not be, “You can have it,” but “No, it’s ours. You are kidnapping it.””

Žižek’s thoughts on the Holy Spirit have deeper roots still, which go to the very heart of the Christian mystery of the Trinity and the incarnation. In a 2004 paper entitled “Death’s Merciless Love”, he reflects on how the transcendent-immanent, divine-human gap is resolved by Jesus’ death on the cross, which finds its fulfilment in and unity with the Holy Spirit:

“[I]n order for humanity to be restored to God, [Christ as the mediator between God and humanity] must sacrifice himself. In other words, as long as Christ is here, there can be no Holy Ghost, which IS the figure of the reunification of God and humanity. Christ as the mediator between God and humanity is, to put it in today’s deconstructionist terms, the condition of possibility AND the condition of impossibility between the two: as mediator, he is at the same time the obstacle which prevents the full mediation of the opposed poles. Or, to put it in the Hegelian terms of the Christian syllogism: there are two “premises” (Christ is God’s Son, fully divine, and Christ is man’s son, fully human), and to unite the opposed poles, to arrive at the “conclusion” (humanity is fully united with God in the Holy Spirit), the mediator must erase himself out of the picture. Christ’s death is not part of the eternal cycle of the divine incarnation and death, in which God repeatedly appears and then withdraws into himself, in his Beyond. As Hegel put it, what dies on the Cross is NOT the human incarnation of the transcendent God, but the God of Beyond Himself. Through Christ’s sacrifice, God Himself is no longer beyond, but passes into the Holy Spirit (of the religious community). In other words, if Christ were to be the mediator between two separated entities (God and humanity), his death would mean that there is no longer a mediation, that the two entities are apart again. So, obviously, God must be the mediator in a stronger sense: it’s not that, in the Holy Spirit, there is no longer the need for Christ, because the two poles are directly united; for this mediation to be possible, the nature of both poles must be radically changed, i.e. in one and the same movement, they both must undergo a transubstantiation. Christ is, on the one hand, the vanishing mediator/medium through whose death God-Father himself “passes into” the Holy Spirit, and, on the other hand, the vanishing mediator/medium through whose death human community itself “passes into” the new spiritual stage.

These two operations are not separated, they are the two aspects of one and the same movement: the very movement through which God loses the character of a transcendent Beyond and passes into the Holy Spirit (the spirit of the community of believers) EQUALS the movement through which the “fallen” human community is elevated into the Holy Spirit. In other words, it is not that, in the Holy Ghost, men and God communicate directly, without Christ’s mediation; it is rather that they directly coincide - God is NOTHING BUT the Holy Spirit of the community of believers. Christ has to die not in order to enable direct communication between God and humanity, but because there is no longer any transcendent God with whom to communicate.”

In a 2009 book entitled “The Monstrosity of Christ. Paradox or Dialectic?” and co-authored with the Anglican theologian John Milbank, Žižek challengingly draws the identification of the community of believers with the Holy Spirit and of the Holy Spirit with the crucified and risen Christ to its ultimate conclusion, which is a life at the end of history, a life of “ethical extravagance” and “permanent revolution”:

“There is, however, a third position between these two extremes, that of the Holy Spirit, of the apocalyptic community of believers, of the self-organization dialectical clarity versus the misty conceit of paradox of believers who drew from Christ’s nonreturn after his death the correct conclusion: they were awaiting the wrong thing, Christ already had returned as the Holy Spirit of their community. The very meaning of Christ’s death is that the work to be done is theirs, that Christ put his trust in them. Once we accept this, Eagleton’s reading of Jesus’ “ethical extravagance” also becomes problematic:

“What one might call Jesus’s ethical extravagance—giving over and above the measure, turning the other cheek, rejoicing in being persecuted, loving one’s enemies, refusing to judge, non-resistance to evil, laying oneself open to the violence of others—is . . . motivated by a sense that history is now at an end. Recklessness, improvidence and an over-the-top lifestyle are signs that God’s sovereignty is at hand.There is no time for political organization or instrumental rationality, and they are unnecessary in any case.”

But is this “extravagance” really constrained to the end-of-time atmosphere in which all we can do is wait and get ready for the Second Coming? Is it not that, in an apocalyptic time—the time of the end of time, as Agamben put it—we have both aspects, “ethical extravagance” as well as political organization? The specificity of the Holy Spirit, the apocalyptic emancipatory collective, is that it is precisely an organization which practices these “ethical extravagances,” i.e., which lives its life in an apocalyptic “state of emergency” in which all ordinary legal (and moral) commitments are suspended, practiced in the mode of “as if not.” The problem with the Church is that it betrayed original Christianity not by its organization, but by the type of this organization: the apocalyptic community of believers which lives in the emergency state of a “permanent revolution” is changed into an ideological apparatus legitimizing the normal run of things. In other words, with the Church, we are not active enough: the pressure of the Second Coming is eased, all we have to do is to lead our daily lives following the prescribed ethico-religious rules, and Salvation will come by itself.“

In summary, Žižek’s Holy Spirit - like all of Žižek’s Trinity - invites to a life of radical commitment in the present, to a life lived with and for others and therefore in God, a life steeped in freedom:

“So what I claim is that something absolutely unheard of happens with Christianity which is that Christ, the death of Christ, means something very radical. It means, in all other religions we trust God, we believe in God. The death of Christ [instead] means, God trusted us. It means, “I give you your freedom, it’s up to you.” The Holy Ghost for me is — and I take it literally when it says in the Bible “Whenever the two of you are there, I will be there, I am there.” — it means the gift of freedom. It means, God doesn’t want to play that “up there a guarantee,” it means God entrusts the fate of creation, his own fate, into us. It means what happens here is part of, as it were, the history of God. And […] à propos iconoclasm […]: the prohibition to make images of God in Judaism does not mean this gnostic way “oh it’s too mysterious, we cannot paint it.” It means the exact opposite! It means God is alive not in your stupid deep meditations of up there, but how you act and react with others. And that’s why you shouldn’t make images because it’s not an image to be made up there. And I think, if anything, even more this holds for Christianity. That’s for me what the Holy Ghost is. God is no longer the substantial master up there, God is — to put it in this way — the spirit of our community, the gift of freedom.”